SEIU has been incessantly battering Sodexo since 2007, in its desire to unionize some of its nearly 400,000 employees, many of them hotel and food service workers. Exacerbating the tensions was a longstanding turf war between SEIU and UNITE HERE over hotel and casino workers, which often spilled over into SEIU’s antics prior to the settlement the warring unions reached this past summer.

Sodexo USA has filed the lawsuit in an attempt to halt the over-the-top harassment from SEIU, alleging that many of the acts are very serious and outside of the normal realm of union tactics, including acts of ” SEIU blackmail, vandalism, trespass, harassment, and lobbying law violations designed to steer business away from Sodexo USA and harm the company.” [emphasis added]

Aside from some of its usual corporate smear campaign tactics, certain organizers in the SEIU subscribed to some especially nasty, and frankly repulsive, tactics:

Be sure to read the whole thing, there’s much more to the story, including the SEIU’s bizarre response to the lawsuit. Hint: They blame the Koch brothers, among others.

Budding teachers will get their first hands-on taste of the profession as the Faculty of Education’s teaching experience program begins for the year this week.

Student Heather Mosher will spend seven weeks teaching English and maths to year zero to two students at Clifton Terrace Model School. Although she is apprehensive about getting her students motivated, she says she is excited to see their progress as they learn.

“I’m keen to have a career that involves working with people and where I would have a lot of potential to make a difference in people’s lives.”

Approximately 215 early childhood education (ECE) and 490 primary and secondary teaching students are enrolled in courses requiring completion of a teaching placement this year.

Associate Dean of Primary and Secondary Teacher Education Dr Louise Starkey says that on average over 90 percent of student teachers gain employment as teachers the year after they graduate from Victoria University. She attributes this success partly to the Faculty of Education’s close working relationship with schools and ECE centres.

“The consistent feedback from these professionals…is that our students are highly regarded”.Associate teachers will assess participants weekly against the New Zealand Teachers Council’s Graduating Teacher Standards.

Washington (CNN) -- A U.S.-led military mission in Libya has effectively imposed a no-fly zone and blasted some of Moammar Gadhafi's ground forces outside the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said Sunday.

The coalition forces, including U.S., British and French aircraft, have taken out most of Libya's air defense systems and some airfields, Mullen said in interviews on CNN's "State of the Union" program and other networks.

In addition, Libyan ground forces in the vicinity of Benghazi were hit in an effort to prevent attacks on lesser-armed rebel fighters and civilians, said Mullen, who called the start of the mission a success.

There's a lot that Shadi has written below that I find disagreement with, but one paragraph really does jump out:

I don't know about you - but I have trouble understanding how people can be okay with sitting back and doing nothing, when, with military intervention, it [protecting civilians] could fairly easily be prevented. We can stop it. Moving to the strict "interests" rationale, it seems fairly self-evident that Libya, under an isolated Qaddafi, would likely return to attacking Western interests in the region, including through terrorism. He's done it before.

Putting aside the notion that an isolated Qaddafi would be more likely to return to terrorism than say a Qaddafi under military attack from the West . . . I would have thought by now that after that whole "greeted by liberators" and "cakewalk" thing in Iraq, foreign policy analysts would be a little more circumspect in describing the use of military force as "easy." This is precisely the sort of language and attitude that worries me so much about this operation - the propensity to watch pictures of cruise missiles flying off ships or see the wreckage from Allied airstrikes and come to believe that anything we are trying to do in Libya today is not extraordinarily difficult or that somehow the hardest part has been done.

I have enormous respect for Shadi's passion around this issue - and the passion of those supporting the use of force. And as I've said I think the decision to intervene is a close call. But it would be helpful if those advocating the use of force were a bit more skeptical about what it can hope to achieve - particularly in regard to protecting civilians. This sort of disregard for the inherent challenges in military intervention is both wrong, it's dangerous - and it seems endemic in the foreign policy community. And dare I say it's a good part of the reason we've stumbled our way into the third military intervention in the last ten years in the Muslim world. How many times will we underestimate the consequences of using military force before we become a bit more hesitant about its recommended utilization?

And to be very candid, no one seems more guilty of this than the President of the United States. Consider this quote from the NYT piece about the decision to intervene:

The president had a caveat, though. The American involvement in military action in Libya should be limited — no ground troops — and finite. “Days, not weeks,” a senior White House official recalled him saying.

Where does this sound familiar? Perhaps from the debates about Afghanistan when Obama demanded that escalation be short-lived and troop withdrawals commence in July 2011. Or perhaps when he told the military that no US troops should be sent to areas that couldn't be turned over to the ANSF by the same date. How are those dictates working out?

You would think that after a deadline for withdrawal from Afghanistan evolved from July 2011 to 2014 this President would be skeptical that any use of military force would be tidy, can be easily limited or could be completed in days, not weeks.

It is a fact of life that decisions made by politicians or any other leaders are analysed by observers as if they were made in isolation from other factors. The moral purity or political expediency of a particular decision is examined as if this decision were made to stand alone and bear the weight of concentrated critique.Yet, most of life is just not like that. The decisions we make are sometimes forced upon us at a time of least expediency and are conditioned by factors that might be either unfortunate, unwanted or, in some way or other, compromising. I suspect that this is usually unwelcome and even unhelpful.

So, at a time when many commentators – seemingly glad of some action to get their teeth into at last – are following the attacks on Libya with a critical eye back onto the hypocrisy of Western support for regimes such as Gaddafi’s, the decision to act over Libya is not capable of being seen through some pure moral lens. We might regret having (a) thought that stable Arab regimes were culturally appropriate and desirable and, therefore, sustainable, and (b) having aided such regimes for a generation or more by arming them to the teeth… in the interests of domestic security, of course.

But, our vision is always limited. It is easy to stand in the academy or the editorial office casting judgement that costs nothing to the judge;it is a different matter entirely to be compelled to jump when you would prefer to wait for more conducive circumstances. David Cameron might reassure us that Libya is no Iraq, but the threats of a ‘long war’ from Gaddafi and the concerns raised by the Arab League (these attacks were apparently not what they thought they had signed up to) might well confound him.I began to think about this element of leadership while reading a paper produced this month by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on Cohesion, counter-terrorism and community in West Yorkshire. I have a huge amount to learn from those on the ground when I move to Bradford next month, so I make no pretensions about fully understanding local cultures there. But, the interesting thing about this paper is the questions it poses to the way we ‘see’ communities in complex circumstances and the assumptions we bring to our judgements.

The paper, based on research, makes a number of points, but two are particularly interesting:

Despite allegations by politicians, media and others that communities lead ‘parallel lives’, the evidence suggests that there already is a huge degree of ‘community cohesion’ in everyday life.

Well-intended policies (a) to prevent terrorism and (b) to build community cohesion conflicted to the extent that potential for neither was maximised.

In the latter case it was simply that policies that were comprehensible in their own right were inhibited by their contextual association with the other. In the words of the summary findings, “The implementation of Prevent at the local level had direct and negative effects on the parallel attempt to pursue community cohesion programmes.”

This is similar to the coincidence of a good idea – the ‘Big Society‘ – with another reality – the Comprehensive Spending Review. The former might well be negated by its association with the latter… despite government attempts to separate the two and retain their distinctive integrities. Put simply (rather than simplistically), the Big Society depends on voluntary groups taking responsibility for services previously provided by the State while the funding for such groups is cut off because of the spending constraints. The association of the two initiatives is unfortunate for many reasons.This might all be obvious to everybody else, but it has got me thinking about the nature of leadership in complex organisations and in complex contexts. We rarely have the freedom to make simple decisions in isolation from the rest of reality: normally our decisions are compromised, subject to unwelcome and intrusive extraneous factors, and held hostage to consequences which cannot be predicted. In the words of the final conclusion of the JRF paper:

Community cohesion as a policy cannot be isolated from the impact of other government policies.

A statement of the obvious, maybe; but, even though the powerbrokers need tight scrutiny in a democracy, we observers might do well to at least recognise the complexity of the decision-making process and its context when we cast our judgements from a distance and the comfort of a study.

The night before presidential elections in Haiti, Fugees co-founder Wyclef Jean, 41, was treated and released from a hospital for a gunshot wound to the hand, according to his spokesperson. Jean was running for president last year, amid controversy, until Haiti's board of elections disqualified him.

Jean's brother, Samuel, confirmed the shooting. Joe Mignon, an officer with Jean's Yele Foundation, told the Associated Press that Jean was wounded late Saturday night in Delmas, a city east of Port-au-Prince.

According to WENN news, the recording artist was with rapper Busta Rhymes and music exec Jimmy Rosemund when the car they were in was "peppered with bullets."

Jean has been in his homeland campaigning for popular musician Michel Martelly as he runs for the nation's highest office (Martelly's opponent is a former first lady, Mirlande Manigat). Ballots are cast today, with results made public by April 16.

The political process in Haiti has been particularly chaotic since the 7.0 earthquake of January 2010. The Red Cross estimated that three million Haitians were affected by the disaster.

Back in 2008, Wyclef recorded a song called 'If I Was President,' which includes lyrics that cast him as a target of political violence: "If I was president / I'd get elected on Friday / Assassinated on Saturday / And buried on Sunday."

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